SFAX, Tunisia, 22 June 2003 — Rescuers off the coast of Tunisia in North Africa were yesterday losing hope of finding alive nearly 200 clandestine immigrants who went missing after their overloaded boat capsized on its way to Europe. “We do not have much chance of finding survivors, the units already operational are trying to recover the corpses of the drowned,” Col. Adel Garma of the national guard told Agence France Presse yesterday, some 36 hours after the boat went down.
Twelve people were confirmed drowned, their bodies fished out by rescuers, 197 were missing and 41 survived after the boat laden with clandestine immigrants from Africa capsized in high seas southeast of the Tunisian industrial city of Sfax. The survivors, including a pregnant woman, said they spent five hours in the open sea before being rescued by fishing crews.
“We had to swim for five hours before being picked up,” 24-year-old Abdeljelil of Morocco told AFP from the port of Sfax, where the survivors, all apparently in good health, were being held yesterday. The boat, “overloaded and in bad condition” sank overnight Thursday carrying some 250 would-be immigrants including nationals of Mali, Ghana, Somalia, Egypt and Morocco whom it picked off the coast of neighboring Libya on Thursday morning and headed for Italy, survivors said.
“We all paid our smugglers in Libya between $500 and $800,” said 28-year-old Aboubakar of Mali. “There were a lot of us in the boat, which was in bad condition.” Abdeljelil said that “cracks appeared in the boat and it began to take on water.”
“We managed to seal them, but soon more appeared and the boat capsized at 1:00 a.m. (midnight Thursday GMT) Friday morning” some seven hours after setting off, Abdeljelil said. The boat sank some 60 nautical miles off the Tunisian coast, between Kerkennah and Djerba islands. The alarm was first raised when the small fishing port of Mahdia near Sfax received a radio distress signal at dawn Friday from the skipper of a fishing vessel from Sfax.
